LEOMINSTER -- Local officials from three cities, real-estate agencies, bankers, and housing and community organizations came together Monday morning at the Boys & Girls Club to discuss the opportunities and challenges of providing low- and moderate-income housing for the region.

The forum, sponsored by the Homeownership Center of North Central Massachusetts and the North Central Massachusetts Community Reinvestment Act Coalition, was an opportunity to give Tom Gleason, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency an idea of what his agency might be able to do to help the communities with housing and other issues.

MassHousing is a quasi-public agency and the state's affordable-housing bank, which offers lending for first-time home buyers and existing moderate-income home buyers who want to refinance their properties to get a better interest rate, as well as lending for the creation of mixed-income rental housing, he said.

Gleason said the market for first-time home buyers has to stay strong from both a real-estate and from an economic perspective, because "if there is no first-time home-buyer market, there will be no trade-up market."

Fidelity Bank Chairman and CEO Ed Manzi said well-intended regulations put in place after the financial crisis are having unintended consequences, including making it harder to approve loans for first-time home buyers.

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Fitchburg Mayor Lisa Wong said it's a two-way street, and that greater financial literacy is needed -- and perhaps should even become a high-school or college requirement -- to ensure that people are making good financial decisions.

Gleason agreed, saying educated consumers are better consumers, and statistics show that people who go through home-buyer counseling are less likely to default and are, overall, better owners in the long term, making them better neighbors in their communities.

He said there are many opportunities when it comes to older housing, but that in many cases, the people who buy these properties "barely fix them up to code," making it difficult to find decent apartments.

Mazzarella said he sees area hotels brimming with families that are living there for a number of reasons, and people working multiple part-time jobs without benefits barely scraping by.

Fitchburg Housing Director Ryan McNutt said one of the biggest issues Fitchburg has with housing is century-old, multifamily properties that are being bought by people with liquid capital from outside the city who are able to take advantage of depressed prices, but don't always have the community's interests at heart.

He said those buildings are exorbitant to repair, and many of the owners are not making the investments that are needed, and are therefore not providing quality housing to the community.

McNutt said incentives are needed to draw people from within the community to purchase and fix up those and other buildings, but the problem is often that large mortgage down-payments prohibit responsible owners from affording repairs.

Rick Vallee, home-loan specialist for Fidelity Bank, said an issue that people who buy so-called fixer-upper properties often run into is that once they've acquired and invested in renovating them, they find the market value of the property has already declined to less than their original acquisition cost.

Gardner Mayor Mark Hawke said he believes his city -- more than 50 percent of the population of which is considered low to moderate income -- will see more growth if more market-rate housing can be brought in.

He wants to see a long-term approach to housing, especially in a place whose growth he said has been stagnant since the 1930s.

"You can't just help that person tomorrow," Hawke said. "You've got to help that person, that community, that area for the next 20, 30 years."

Wong said the cities need to rise above the gentrification approach to urban renewal, and that they can't simply tear down old buildings and bring in people with money and displace the poor. Rather, she said, they need to find a way to create wealth in existing communities.

"It is harder to help those who need assistance to rise in terms of their status, in terms of their ability, to get housing, to get jobs, to get their lives together, to overcome mental illness, and so on," she said. "That is hard work to do."

Wong cited the work done by Fitchburg in partnership with the Twin Cities Community Development Corp., in Fitchburg's Elm Street area, and the investment made there by creating a neighborhood association and bringing residents together to find out what they wanted before conducting any major demolitions and other projects.

Through those efforts, she said, vacant garages were replaced with single-family homes, giving the people in the community who wanted a chance at going from renters to homeowners to make their own long-term commitment to the neighborhood.

Fitchburg Police Sgt. Glenn Fossa spoke about the public-safety impacts of that work, and how violent crime, especially to children, dropped as a result.

Fitchburg State University President Robert Antonucci spoke about cleaning up the college neighborhood and its commitment to the area as one of its largest employers.

He said the university and the community are richer places when staff and students live in close proximity, because they are more involved and committed to the community.

"Together, we can make this region a region of choice, where people want to live here, where they want to bring up their families, where they want to educate their people and where they can contribute to the overall integrity and wellness of the community," Antonucci said.

Part of the neighborhood work FSU did involved buying and fixing properties that students and university police now occupy, helping to push out the bad elements and retain the responsible owners and families who want to fix up their buildings, Antonucci said.

He said the university "took a lot of heat" when it decided to purchase a house at the corner of Highland Avenue and Congress Street to make it a house for the president and alumni, and people questioned why the president would want to live in a neighborhood that is not perceived to be safe.

"If any president that comes after me doesn't want to live in that house, they shouldn't be the president," Antonucci said.

Peter Milewski, director of the MassHousing mortgage-insurance fund, implored those in attendance at the forum to think of the different housing programs that are currently "acting in silos."

He said they should figure out ways to pool ideas and combine resources in strategic initiatives to help home buyers and the communities they want to invest in.

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